Tethered to Socialism: The Cultural Work of the German Minority in the Czech Lands around the Time of the Prague Spring, 1968–70

Abstract

The German national community living in the Czech lands enjoyed a prosperous history throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one that, despite some tensions with the majority Czech population, featured cross-cultural cooperation in the economic, political, and social arenas. The Nazi German occupation and World War II, as well as the postwar expulsion of the Germans, turned neighbors into enemies and divided ethnic communities across the Czech lands. The expulsion of three million Germans in 1945–46 bore consequences not only for those who were subject to expulsion, but also for those who received permission from the Czechoslovak state to remain behind. The status and stature of this remnant minority group shifted throughout the postwar period, but its significance as a bearer of German cultural life never waned. The state's immediate reaction to the quarter million Germans who remained behind was one of forced assimilation. Many thousands of Germans succumbed to the pressures of forced assimilation in the late 1940s and 1950s when the Czechoslovak state presented them with no other option than to become Czechs. Methods of forced assimilation included the stripping away of minority rights, such as linguistic and educational rights and the right to form independent cultural organizations, as well as the collective conferral of Czechoslovak citizenship upon the entire German population in 1953. Despite these pressures, a significant cohort of Germans who steadfastly clung to German national identification found means to resist the state's assimilative methods and succeeded in supporting German cultural life and identity into the 1960s.